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Shopify acquires Tailwind

tailwindcss.com

171–180 of 403 posts

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.

Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It g…

> which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode.

You are making quite an assumption here.

Bootstrap was a twitter os library that is still in development today.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#172
post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

is there a need to reach for compiled languages if you are building a new program? Won't using vanilla assembly while taking advantage of the latest instructions be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining assembly), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

(Abstractions are still very useful to LLMs)

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#173
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with "nor should it be" - the market decided it was clearly needed. And this isn't unique to Tailwind. For decades, companies in many ecosystems (like .NET, JS, etc) have made lots of money selling component libraries that save developers and companies a lot of time. And I even bought UI.sh in April, and it really was great until the models just natively got much better. I happily paid for Tailwind UI b…

"nor should it be" is connected to "being worth millions". It's not that it isn't worth money, but it's more of a lifestyle business than the sort of thing that will drive a tech company with employees, marketing, and conference budgets.

I’m not sure what their valuation was but single digits millions sounds totally reasonable for a company you’re describing. Just to hire 10 engineers you’ll need to be in low millions

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#174
post #86
post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

This is a good discussion: do LLMs change the calculus for DRY? A major point of components is having a single place where you can change design and behavior across your entire codebase. With LLMs you can with very good accuracy tell them to change the look of "all buttons that are confirmation buttons in modals but not in the login modal". Doesn't matter if there are 10 such buttons or 1000, it'll take a few seconds…

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Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#175
post #114

tailwindcss is an anti-pattern that breaks fundamental rule of software engeneering - separation of concerns. just learn how to use CSS - it will benefit you in the long run. i suspect they will be "paywalling" more and more features in the future.

HTML and CSS are not a separation of concerns in anything I've ever built. They're both representing the layout/design. I don't want them separate.

You end up having to keep them synchronized anyway, messing with your HTML is frequently gonna break your CSS. Tailwind is infinitely more pleasant to write than a separate CSS file that has to be kept in sync with the HTML.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#176
post #42

Serious question: is there a need to reach for tailwind if you are building a new site? Won't using vanilla CSS while taking advantage of the latest features be pretty good, since humans are not manually making edits (which removes many of the pain points of maintaining CSS), while simplifying dependency and the build pipeline?

It still helps deduplicate.

Not really. Every single button that gets rendered has thirty class names attached to it instead of one. It really bloats markup with duplicated classes.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why insult the millions of users relying on Tailwind?

What's the insult? Tailwind is specifically for people who don't like writing CSS because it avoids various ways CSS works and comes with predefined styles.

"Pathology"

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#178
post #25

I instruct my agents to build UI exclusively with bootstrap 5, jQuery, and HTMX. Every app is fast, responsive, progressive, small, and most importantly: it fits in my brain and I can maintain it. No build step or really any tooling at all.

Curious what jQuery brings for you these days? My favorite jQuery features got implemented in the vanilla DOM APIs (document.querySelector and fetch being the big one for me). Now I'm curious if I'm missing out.

Re: Shopify acquires Tailwind

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it suck that shopify got them? They seem to be a good steward of open source, especially with rails.

Usually when stuff like this happens, it means that Tailwind's developers are moving to work on Shopify instead, which means Tailwind CSS itself goes into maintenance mode. That's what usually happens when a dependency is picked up by a company with a huge, "more interesting" product -- the dependency starts to depend on the more interesting product for attention, and stops receiving attention on its own merits. It g…

Tailwind is more relevant than ever in web development, it's practically the native language for UIs in the LLM world.

I don't see why they'd put Tailwind into maintenance mode when they just purchased a pretty major building block in the modern web stack.

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